Fintech has made financial services faster, but also more distant. Tom Gray, Global Chief Strategy Officer at Imagination, argues that the route to real trust runs through the real world.
Earlier this year, SoFi asked 800 American adults how they felt about payment apps. Nearly three-quarters said they trust them as much as, or more than, a traditional bank. So far, so good for fintech.
Then the stakes went up. Asked how they’d send $1,000, almost a third said they’d abandon their usual app and fall back on something more traditional.
What’s going on? If people trust the app, why won’t they trust it with something that matters?
I think it tells us something about the kind of trust fintech has built. It’s trust in the interface: the tap, the notification, the money landing. That kind of trust is earned through use, and fintech has earned a lot of it. What’s missing is something older and harder to code: the confidence that there’s something solid behind the screen.
Not ‘does it work?’ but ‘is it real?’
Most fintech marketing is built to answer a functional question. Is it faster? Is it cheaper? Does it work? Hence the steady drumbeat of ads promising a slicker app, a better rate, a smoother sign-up.
But by now most people assume the app works. App store ratings, reviews and a free download settle that in about thirty seconds. The questions that actually stop someone moving their salary, their savings or their pension are more human than that.
Is this thing real? Are there real people behind it? And are they people like me?
Financial products are invisible by nature. There’s often no branch to walk into, no shelf to pick from, no person across a desk. When a brand exists only as an icon on your home screen, it might spark fears that it could disappear as quickly as it arrived.
That absence of physical presence extends to service. When something goes wrong, navigating an automated chatbot or waiting hours for an asynchronous response only reinforces the feeling of isolation. Placing a real, empathetic human at the end of a line when it matters most transforms support from a friction point into a powerful signal of credibility and care.
Trust is rarely a single decision, it’s an accumulation. Psychologists call this the mere-exposure effect: we warm to things simply by encountering them again and again. We also lean heavily on the people around us: we’re far more likely to trust something when we can see others like us already using it.
Put those together and you get two things a fintech brand needs that its product alone can’t supply.
The first is closeness. Not intimacy, necessarily, but a sense of proximity: that there are people behind this, that you could meet them, that they aren’t hiding behind the interface.
The second is presence. A brand that turns up in the places you already spend your time – your city, your commute, your weekend – stops being an abstraction and becomes part of the furniture of everyday life.
Traditional banks had both by default. The branch on the high street, the name on the stadium, the logo on the school fête banner. They were in the world. Fintech skipped that step on the way to speed and scale, and it’s left a gap.
From sponsorship to experience
If trust comes from closeness and presence, the question for fintech brands is where and how to show up. The options sit on a spectrum, from borrowed presence to earned closeness.
Sponsorship is the most familiar. Attaching your name to something people already care about, whether a club, a festival or a grassroots league, signals permanence. It says: we’re investing in your world and we plan to stick around.
Sponsorship may be borrowed trust, but it offers brands the opportunity to build on that – using sponsorship to create real world experiences and activations for fans – or hospitality to create time and closeness with corporate clients.
Experiential activations at sports arenas or cultural festivals convert passive sponsorship into immersive brand engagement. Rather than simply placing a logo on a perimeter board, these environments offer tangible moments where fans interact directly with the brand and services, making the brand feel embedded in their passions.
Real-world collaborations take this a step further by weaving the brand into cultural moments people already enjoy. High-profile, playful activations – like a surprise pop-up cafe or a bakery takeover with popular creators – turn everyday transactions into shared social experiences. They get members of the public talking, participating, and capturing moments, transforming a digital tool into a vibrant, physical presence.
This is why the best fintech experiences aren’t really product demos. A demo answers ‘does it work?’, which most people have already settled. An experience personlises the brand and product, makes it feel closer and more relatable.
Fintech has spent a decade removing the distance between people and their money. The irony is that it created a new distance between people and the brands that hold it.
Closing that gap won’t come from a louder promise. It comes from being somewhere people can find you, meet you and recognise themselves in you.
The brands that win the $1,000 transfer won’t be the ones with the fastest app. They’ll be the ones people can picture.